Orient

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The Orient (from , "rising sun"), later also called Orient, is originally one of the four Roman regions of the world. On the Roman axis between north (midnight) and south (lunch) lies the Orient, the world region in the east, opposite the Occident (evening country, from , "setting sun") with the areas lying in the west.

Change in meaning

The term Orient is subject to historical changes and has been (and still is today) shaped by different discourses. Thus, geographical, political, linguistic and cultural considerations play a role in the attempt to make more precise statements about the term Orient.

Originally, the term "Orient" or "Orient" functioned. “Morgenland” as direction (cf. sunrise), where the reference location could vary depending on the location of the speaker. Thus the word “morning land” in the Old Testament stood for the territories east of Israel or Judah. With the shift of the cultural centers in the consciousness of Western Christianity to Central and Western Europe, the "Orient" also shifted westward. As a result, in the European High Middle Ages, the regions of the Eastern Churches (parts of Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, Balkans) were “in the Orient”.

The term was again taken up in the context of the world regions defined by the Romans (lat. plagae mundi). The name plaga orientalis meant one of four regions of the world. In Greek today the Orient is called anatoli (ανατολή, see Anatolia) and in Italian and Spanish it is called levante (participle present to levare "to rise"). The geographical term Levant refers to the countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean.

Throughout history, the meaning of the term continued to change. The Orient has never existed as a coherent empire or as a state. During modern times, it became in the German-speaking area the name for a fixed geographical and cultural area. In the 19th century, the term “Orient” finally acquired an enormous spectrum of meaning. This is how the term at that time referred to the entire Asian world, i.e. the Arab countries, Iran, India, China and Japan. In addition, the countries of Southeast Europe, which at that time belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and the Balkans were also counted as the Orient. In addition to these areas to the east from a central or western European perspective, the term “Orient” also included areas to the south from this perspective. In the 19th century, the entire African continent was counted almost throughout the Orient. In addition, even Spain, southern Italy, Crete and Cyprus were sometimes considered Oriental.

Today’s language use in German-speaking countries tends to refer to the predominantly Islamic regions of Near East Asia and North Africa – including Iran and Afghanistan but without the Islamic states of South and Southeast Asia (cf